Interactionist and labelling theory

Social Construction of crime

• For labelling theorists no act is deviant in itself: deviance is simply a social construct.
  • According to Becker, social groups create deviance by creating rules and applying them to particular people whom they label as outsiders.
  • Thus an act or a person only becomes deviant when labelled by others as deviant.
• Differential enforcement
  • Labelling theorists argue that social control agents i.e. police and courts tend to label certain groups and criminal.
  • Piliavin and Briar found police decisions to arrest were based on stereotypical ideas about manner, dress, gender, class, ethnicity, time and place.
• Typification
  • Cicourel argues that police use typifications (stereotypes) of the ‘typical delinquent’ and those fitting the typification are more likely to be stopped, arrested and charged.
    • Working class and ethnic minority juveniles are more likely to be arrested, once arrested they’re more likely to be charged.
    • Middle class juveniles are less likely to fit the typification and have parents who can negotiate successfully on their behalf, they are less likely to be charged.
  • Social construction of crime stats: a topic not a resource
    • Working class people fit the typifications of police so police are more likely to patrol the area, resulting in more arrests.
    • Cicourel argues that we cannot take crime statistics at face value or use them as a resource, we should treat them as a topic and investigate the process in which they are constructed
  • The dark figure is the difference between the official statistics and the real rate of crime – called the dark figure as it is impossible to know how much is missed through how much crime is undetected, unreported and under-recorded.
    • Some Sociologists therefore use victim surveys or self-report studies to gain a more accurate view.

The effects of labelling

• Lemert argues that by labelling certain people as deviant, society actually encourages them to become more so: societal reaction causes secondary devolution.

Primary and secondary deviance

• Primary Deviance is deviant acts that haven’t been publicly labelled, they have many causes are often trivial and mostly go uncaught, those who commit them do see themselves as deviant.
• Secondary deviance results from social reactione. labelling. Labelling someone as an offender involves stigmatising and excluding them from normal society, others may see the offender purely by their label which becomes the individuals master status or controlling identity.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

• Being labelled may provoke a crisis for the individuals self-concept and lead to a SFP in which they live up to their label, resulting to secondary deviance.
• Further societal reaction may reinforce the individuals outsider status and lead to them joining a deviant subculture that offers support, role models and a deviant career.

Youngs study of hippy marijuana users illustrates these proceedings

• Drug use was initially peripheral to the hippies lifestyle (primary deviance), but police persecution of them as junkies (societal reaction) led to them going into closed groups, developing a deviant subculture where drug use became a central activity (SFP)
• The control process aimed at producing law-abiding behaviour provoked the opposite.

Deviance application spiral

• In the spiral, the attempt to control deviance, leads to more deviance, which leads to even greater control which leads to even greater deviance and so on in an never-ending spiral.

Folk devils and moral panics

• Cohens study of the mods and rockers uses the concept of deviance amplification spiral:
  • Media exaggeration and distortion begins a moral panic, with growing public concern.
  • Moral entrepreneurs call for a ‘crackdown’ in which the police respond by arresting more youths, provoking more concern.
  • Demonising the mods and rockers as ‘folk devils’ marginalised them further, resulting in more deviance.
• The work of Cohan and Young points to a key difference with functionalism.
  • Functionalists see deviance as producing social control
  • Labelling theorists see control producing further deviance.

Mental illness and suicide.

Douglas: the meaning of suicide

• Douglas argues that to understand suicide we must discover its meanings for the deceased, he rejects the use of official statistics as they’re social constructs that only tell us about the labels applied by coroners. To discover the deceased meanings you need to use qualitative methodsg. looking at suicide notes and unstructured interviews with the deceased relatives.

Atkinson: coroners commonsense knowledge

• Atkinson focused on how coroners use taken-for-granted assumptions to construct social reality.
• He found their ideas about a typical suicide affected their verdict e.g. they saw certain mods of death, locations and circumstances of the death and their life histories as typical of suicide.

Mental illness

• Interactionists reject the use of official statistics on mental illness as social constructs – just a record of the activities of doctors with the power to attach labels such as schizophrenic.
• Paranoia as a SFP
  • Interactionists are interested in how a person comes to be labelled as mentally ill and in the effects of this labelling. Lemert shows socially awkward individuals may be labelled and excluded from groups.
  • The individuals negative response gives the group reason to fear for his mental health and this may lead to a medical label of paranoia. The label ‘mental patient’ becomes the master status.
• Institutionalism
  • Goffman shows the possible effects of being admitted into a ‘total institution’ such as a psychiatric hospital.
  • Patients undergo a ‘mortification of the self’ in which their old identity is ‘killed off’ and replaced by a new one: ‘inmate’. This is achieved by ‘degradation rituals’g. confiscation of personal effects.